Book Review: Radical Inclusion

Title: Radical Inclusion

Author: David Moinina Sengeh

Date: 2023

Publisher: Hyperion

ISBN: to be assigned

Length: unpaginated

 Quote: "There were suggestions that the royal family and the [Q]ueen herself were embarrassed that she would have had to use a wheelchair in public," 

The opening of the British Parliament, traditionally done by the monarch, came to exclude Queen Elizabeth II as "mobility issues" made the routine movements of the ceremony difficult for her, Sengeh says at the beginning of this book. Henry Louis Gates, who remained a friend after being his teacher, called the police to report a burglary, then set about trying to enter his own home and was arrested for disorderly conduct when the police arrived. In some countries, formerly including Sierra Leone, pregnant female students were not allowed to go to school. 

Sengeh can't do anything about the idea that it's embarrassing to use a wheelchair, nor about the prejudice that kept the police from recognizing Gates as the owner of the house with the damaged door lock. As a cabinet minister in the government of Sierra Leone he could, however, work to get pregnant teenagers back into school. He has a success story to tell about how he used familiar principles of communication to achieve a major change in the law.

If I were a nicer person, no doubt, I'd feel more inspired by this success and less inclined to call attention to the book's shortcomings than I do. Sengeh recognizes social "exclusion" only of the groups of people of most current interest to the Left. There are passing warbles about his friendships with someone who was Jewish and with a couple of schoolmates who were homosexual. Sengeh studied at Harvard so it's reasonable and legitimate that he's concerned about bias against Black people in the United States, but he has remarkably little to say about bias against the ethnic-cultural minority groups in various African countries, or about minority or cultural-equivalent-of-minority groups in the United States that the Left aren't trying to co-opt.

In fact, when he's talking about his ideals of inclusiveness, I feel alienated. I think I may be older than Sengeh is. (He avoids giving a precise date of birth, but people my age drew inspiration from musicians like Aretha Franklin, John Lennon, the early Michael Jackson; Sengeh tells a story that takes several e-pages in which he draws inspiration from Eminem.) His definition of inclusive social events was formed during a course of study that culminated in 2010. And after thirty years, after the publication of The Highly Sensitive Person, The Introvert Advantage, AND Quiet, his definition of inclusive social events was the same old one that served my friends and me so badly. That's discouraging. To his seven rules of inclusivity I believe at least two more need to be added:

1. Don't ruin the whole event by straining for "inclusivity." "Good" schools, sports events, musical groups, etc., are for people who enjoy doing something well enough to have cultivated above-average abilities. People who like to read don't appreciate dumbed-down books. Restaurants that specialize in one kind of food seldom find it profitable to try to specialize in a different kind of food. Everything can't be for everyone, so it's better to let things be what they are and attract the people they attract. The fewer things that need to be equally accessible to everyone in a region, the better.

2. While some aspects of individuals' "personalities" are clearly learned habits, and the etiology of other aspects isn't clear, introversion is a positive, permanent, physical trait--less visible, but not less important, than sex or color. Including introverts begins with recognizing that it's never going to look like including extroverts. If you want to be inclusive of introverts, you learn and follow our rules. 

(And if you don't want to be inclusive of introverts, don't expect us to care how inclusive of other demographic groups you're trying to be. Things that appeal to extrovert women, Latinos, "sexual minority" types, etc., seldom do anything for the introverts in those categories. "Being Irish is fun" partly because Irish poets were always recognized as different from Irish pub-crawlers.) 

Problems are built into even the topic of Sengeh's success story. It's wonderful that he succeeded in getting the rules rewritten to allow pregnant students to stay in school if they want to. What if they don't want to? As he mentions in the book, right away some women said they didn't want to go to school while they were pregnant, because of the physical inconveniences. Pregnancy needs to be considered as the first year in a three-year course of intensive motherhood, during which nature did not intend for women to waste their energies on people other than The Baby. Really including pregnant teenagers in society might mean reducing the emphasis on getting through school on a predetermined schedule and refocussing attention on how much individual women can learn at home. This web site is all in favor of maximizing everybody's opportunities to benefit from as much education as they want. For teenagers that may mean removing every "compulsory" element from the school experience. While some pregnant and nursing women do want to go to classes, their academic interest and ability will drop, and their academic records may benefit from opportunities to repeat the same courses later. My question would be whether securing the rights of some pregnant teenagers to stay in school, even in boarding school if their parents don't want them at home, could be done in a way that respected the rights of pregnant teenagers to withdraw from other people and focus on being good mothers.

Many recent and current political problems have been created by the "progressive" socialist assumption that social institutions' role is to make all families alike, rather than working with the enormous differences among families. Including everyone in society really means including the families where parents understand the need to nourish and cherish their grandchildren, regardless of their opinions about the circumstances of those grandchildren's birth. And can such inclusion be "equal"? One might as well require every resident of a town to compete "equally" in a foot race. Obviously, for the purpose of covering ground fast, longer legs are better than shorter legs. For the purpose of rearing healthy children, likewise, some families are better than other families. The most humane thing for the "social planners" and "social workers" to do may be to avoid setting up situations where comparison is possible--keeping the two-year-olds out of the teen athletes' way.

But although it's easy for this web site to criticize Sengeh's unquestioning adoption of the philosophy, vocabulary, and methods of "progressive" socialism, that's not what Radical Inclusion is about. Sengeh's assumption that most people who read a book about how a law was changed will be Progs is probably correct, unfortunately. In the United States, at least, libertarians and conservatives have done a good job identifying laws that could helpfully be changed, but have neglected the study of how they can be changed. Sengeh is here to help. In this book he spells out his strategies for making sure the change will benefit at least some people, for recruiting and deploying allies, for marketing the change he wanted to an immediate superordinate who initially seemed to be on the other side, and more. This book is for homeschoolers, it is for those who want to strengthen the U.S. or U.K.'s identity as majority-Christian nations, and it is for Glyphosate Awareness. Whatever our causes and concerns may be, it can be worth applying the strategy Sengeh describes using for his cause.

Radical Inclusion is not a specifically Christian book, though Sengeh does identify as Catholic. It does, however, describe and give an example of an approach to change that is likely to appeal to Christians. Sengeh's approach works from the middle up as well as down, rather than from the top down, of those hierarchies the sinful human nature loves to set up. It defines victory as conversions of people who are presumed to want the same thing you do--the good of society--rather than smashing defeats of opponents. It does not guarantee, but does leave room for, "win-win" outcomes. 

Because it is contemporary, short, and focussed specifically on the benefits of including as many people as possible in a movement for change, I'd say that this book belongs in every activist's tool kit. Sengeh's ideas of inclusiveness are neither original nor new, but his presentation of them (though wordy) is more succinct than any of the older writers' discussions that I can remember. Because the case it studies takes place in a country that seems exotic and legendary to most of the English-speaking world, this book may be superficially more interesting and ultimately more memorable than the older books were, too.

This review was written from an advance review copy; at the time of writing the book is not yet available in stores. It's worth watching for, even pre-ordering if your favorite bookseller has found the local market for African books to be slow.